Pulling armature from hierarchy?
Every armature looks like that in the outliner. An armature is a little different from other objects - the bones show up twice, the Armature item holds the bone data used in edit mode, while the Pose data is what you animate in pose mode.

To deform a character mesh with an armature ensure you have selected your mesh and your armature and that your armature is the active object, that is the one that is highlighted in yellow rather than orange (if your armature is in pose mode it will be blue if it is active) this answer includes pictures. Automatic weights will only work if the armature is positioned within the mesh.

If you do have trouble setting up the armature you can also add an armature modifier to the mesh object and setup vertex weights using weight painting or manually assigning weights to a selection of vertices.